What Is a Curator in Chief?

Neil Sanderson is the Chief Curator at Eqentia--a software platform service that enables professional users and organizations to easily aggregate, curate and republish the news that's important to them. Eqentia's sites are both public and private--with some of the more public ones including Visability Marketing (visabilitymarketing.com) and Slices of Boulder (slicesofboulder.com) which is a local news website for Boulder, Colorado. More than 50 of the portals can be found at portal.eqentia.com/channels. I asked Neil what a 'Chief Curator' does. "It's much like being an Editor, except that I do not commission original reporting or writing." And Neil went on to explain that his job has three main tasks; finding, managing filters, and providing human curation. So, what kind of background does it take to be a Curator in the new world? Today--Sanderson says the man / machine mix is critical. Machines may evolve, but they'll never have a human sense of relevance.

Why Content Curation Is Here to StaySteve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org.Viral Journalism and the Valley of AmbiguityHow much does search engine optimization play into how effectively a story is picked up virally? If a story contains rhetoric that is more likely to get passed on, even if it's "important" — famous names, scandal — does that play a role? Take recaps, here and elsewhere: I'm slowly drifting away from them because they seem to be increasingly simple plot recounts that go over the sexy sexiness of sexy sex and the fabulous fabulousness of fabulous fabulousness. Based on reads and short, quipy comments, I'd assume those are more popular than deep-dives that try to answer "so what?" questions. (Maybe that was always the case and I'm just becoming jaded, but especially in the past year recaps seem to leave me knowing less about a show than more.)

"Is Online "Curation" the New "Aggregation"?" by PBS News BlogDecember 1, 2010 at 4:42 PM EST Is online "curation" the new "aggregation"? In Tuesday's , veteran media analyst Bob Garfield blogs about online curation as the source of much of the vital information he comes across (if one considers viral videos and political gaffes "vital information"). Bob writes: "The nearly infinite supply of content demands that we rely on others -- either the crowd as a whole, or tribes with which we identify, or individual experts we've come to trust... Which is why you haven't pored over the movie ads lately.

Curating the Content OverloadIf I were a venture capitalist, I’d invest in applications and companies that attack the problem of curating content. Content used to be king. The best content attracted attention, consumption and dollars. The quality of your content determined your success.The 5 Models Of Content CurationCuration has always been an underrated form of creation. The Getty Center in Los Angeles is one of the most frequently visited museums in America – and started as a private art collection from one man (J. Paul Getty) who had a passion for art. Aside from a few well known examples like this one, however, the term curation has rarely been used outside of the world of art … until now. One of the hottest trends in social media right now is content curation – thanks in no small part to the leading efforts of several thought leaders actively promoting the idea. Joe Pulizzi is a “content marketing evangelist” who speaks and writes often about content marketing publishes a list of the best content marketing blogs across the web.

Why Social Media Reinvigorates the Market for Quality JournalismSocial media has created a human filter for quality content. The social web, like the old water cooler, favors conversations around news and even in-depth journalism that may not otherwise receive the exposure it deserves. Recent analysis of the most-tweeted stories from The Daily iPad app revealed that users shared more hard news stories over gossip and opinion pieces. This doesn't necessarily mean these are the stories most people are reading.

Humans vs machines: Aggregation vs curationCuration is becoming an increasingly important term and for good reason: the online world is increasingly messy, muddled and full of blind alleys. Search used to be the best way to navigate online but today it is only one part of an Internet user’s dashboard. Finding things is fine if you know what to look for, but search is increasingly less effective in judging the quality of links, or putting those links into a context. Blekko, the recently launched search engine tries to provide a context for search terms but it’s still not curation but aggregation So what is curation? Here is my definition:

Facebook and the Age of Curation Through UnsharingFacebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. You found or did something you thought your audience would care about, and you went to the trouble of sharing it. This worked when we didn’t have so much content at our finger tips, but as more news and media consumption moves online, the friction of constantly opting in exhausts us and we don’t bother to distribute what others might enjoy. That’s why I believe we are entering the age of curation through unsharing, and it will force us to change.Startups StrawberryJ.am and Buffer Team Up on Tools to Curate the WebTwo startups aimed at tackling the problem of excessive noise on Twitter are combining forces. Twitter-powered new reader StrawberryJ.am is partnering with tweet-scheduler Buffer to surface the top stories in your social stream each day and tweet them at regular intervals. Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does.